Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content
teenvogue.comI have some good friends who've gone the other way: they've asked that there be as close to no photos or videos of their child on any social media as possible. They don't post about him online, and they keep pictures of him in photo albums. When he was born, they asked all of us to please refrain from taking photos of him without their permission.
I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.
My wife and I have done similar. We privately share photos. It took a bit for my mom to get over the fact that she can’t post pictures of her grandkids on Facebook but I was eventually able to explain why in terms she understood.
We are also doing this. I'm amazed at how much some people share of their kids online.
Same here, but I don't expect some sort of magic happening. Big tech likely know every detail of my kids anyway. It's just your social circle and bad apples within that you wanna be sure of.
What arguments have you used to finally convince them?
Several things helped her accept the situation.
1. We regularly share photos through private photo albums. This allows her the same exposure to photos of the grandchildren as social media would.
2. We made it clear she's free to share photos with people via direct text messages. It adds a bit of friction and keeps the photos relatively private.
3. Explained that it's the right of our children to control their presence online (with some parental assistance). They aren't old enough to do that so until then, please don't share.
4. Emphasize many times that it's about protecting and empowering our kids. It's not about preventing her from showing off her grandchildren.
We do this as well, specifically #1 we do through apple's private shared albums. It's quite good, we've got a big chunk of the family on there, so people comment as I assume they would on Facebook. This has assuaged their (proud grandparents) urge to post photos on their other social media, I think. I'm not on Facebook so I'm not positive what they are doing on there, but the banal comments that show up in the family feed remind me of why I'm not.
I commented elsewhere and mentioned that #1 is the path we took. That said, while we encountered next to no resistance on this policy from our family, we've found that in practice, my mother really thrives on #2, to the point where I'm confident that our broader family/friends group gets pictures directly from her and hardly bothers visiting my private gallery.
Yeah, this has been a source of hurt feelings for my parents, my wife's parents, and the parents of many of our peers... Facebook-addicted Boomers literally crying, "But everyone else gets to put up pictures of their grandchildren!"
Grandparents have shared photos of their relatives, just usually through wallet photos in the past, email maybe later - so it probably feels like a small delta on that. Probably doesn’t help more of their lives are spent online than in person now.
I’d been printing off photos in various sizes (wallet to 8x10) and sending them along to my parents/grandparents - but it does take more effort to follow through. I do post photos of kids to a private account but maybe once or twice a year.
We upload and organize our family photos in a private Flickr album, and the grandparents have access to that. The presentation is beautiful and I update it at least once a month, so they should be able to enjoy it. If they pull up the album on their phone to show off some photos to a friend in-person, like they would've done in the past with a wallet photo, we're fine with that. Unfortunately, what they really want is the shower of Likes and comments from their 1,000+ Facebook "friends" (and God knows who else with their privacy settings).
I was also using iCloud shared photo album which was great until my mother switched to an android phone (in addition, lost true Facetime support which was also a bummer)
Ironically she switched to an android phone because she had too many photos I think and was always running out of storage. Of course the new phone had no photos, and her old phone would have been just fine if she was happy to start over too.
We got the grandparents Aura smart frames. It's trivial to add photos and short videos. They get to see a new pic of the kid almost every day.
As soon as anyone visits their house, they immediately see recent pics of the kid.
It's been a big winner.
I am a parent of a toddler and he’s only on Apple Photos, my wife and I don’t use social media.
That said, I expect to be downvoted into oblivion.
> anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them
I don’t know, I mean a lot of parents tell themselves they are doing a lot of things, me included, that they have no control over in reality.
I sympathize with the parents who try to turn their kids into celebs. We made this celebs-rule world.
For every one person, kids or adults, who feels exposed online, there are 99,999 more toiling away in obscurity.
On this forum probably the children are going to be fine. Their parents are rich enough that even if you are not a nepo baby in the strictest sense of having a famous last name, they will be fine. They can do whatever and they will be fine.
If you’re some random person, obscurity is crushing. If you’re not a nepo baby and you have no above average cognitive gifts, which is 80% of people, getting some attention can change your life.
Most people have the level of drama, the stupidity, the vapidity of influencers. You just didn’t know that until TikTok. TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.
And social media DOES benefit them, it IS rational. It’s the textbook definition of elitism to tell people who found a little fame and like it that they aren’t like the smart kids or true blue nepo babies, who can be offline and still thrive in this world.
> TikTok doesn’t cause this, it doesn’t even exacerbate it.
I agree with the first but not the second. I think "social media" is a net good, by far. At the same time, there are negative effects: one is that it creates a constant audience for whatever stupid thing the Influencer wants to do or say, which is an incentive for them to say or do stupid things.
My sister has gone to this extreme, and I do feel like it is extreme. She doesn't allow her kids to do sports, for example, for fear of their name or image getting out. In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.
To me this feels like the cell phone discussions of the mid-90s (people who refused to get cell phones because they didn't want to be constantly connected). Eventually almost everyone realizes that the world has changed. Unless you keep your kid from interacting with the world, there will eventually be little you can do to prevent them from having some online presence.
I don't think your sister is where my friends are. They're not demanding schools not take class photos, or whatever. They're just asking people not to record their child and post them online without getting permission first. Most schools at least have you sign a release that outlines what the video/photos would be used for.
> In contrast, as my kids play sports, most of their peers are trying to build their brand -- as NIL deals are almost directly correlated with your social media popularity.
If the kid wants to "build their brand" with parental permission, that's one thing. It's another thing entirely for random people unrelated to the kid to record them and put it online.
Hard same on this. I didn’t think about it for the first few years of being a parent but, several years ago, I deleted all photos of my kids on social media, as well as a few random ones I had on my blog (followed soon after by deleting all non-professional social media content and accounts). Triggered by an article I read (I wish I’d kept it), it occurred to me that I didn’t have the right to use my kids’ images without their permission. All it once, it felt unfair and irresponsible. Soon after, my oldest asked me, after taking her picture, something to the effect of “is that going to be on the internet?” I was pleased to say “no, never.”
Aside: I wonder if it’s going to be a different experience for kids in the generations that have thousands of photos from their childhood available to them. As someone interested in knowing more about my past, I can’t help but to think it will be a good thing to know all the cool stuff they did, whether they remember it or not.
I try to do this for myself, & often request that nobody take photos of me if possible, but definitely to not to post images of me online without my explicit permission. Even amongst my close friends & family, it frequently causes friction & outright anger.
Same. I wish this was the default (don't post pics of me without my consent), but unfortunately it's not. People just expect that everyone wants to be blasted all over social media, and they get butt-hurt when I ask them to remove pics of me.
- Hey, thanks for inviting me to your wife's birthday party. I had a lot of fun. But could you please remove my pic from your Facebook post?
- Why did you show up in the first place? OR You're in a lot of the pics; I can't remove all of them. OR Are you too good to be seen in pics with my wife and her friends? OR Are you hiding from the law? Did you murder someone?
Do you actually phrase it as a request? I find that some social media averse people also tend to be curt/sharp with their requests (I totally understand the underlying concern though).
I feel like photos are nothing special, a lot of the friction/anger people are just responding to perceiving an accusatory tone. (But I'm willing to let the odd photo slide, so maybe dropping the worst arguments made life easier)
My wife and I do this for our kids. Photo albums are more fun anyways as looking through them and talking about the memories is more of an event then just getting a 'like' on a photo.
We do this too for our kids. Now that they are a bit older they are very happy with our decision.
100% on the same page here, I plan on doing the same, and my sister does the same thing with her kid. Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet. They used to be tucked in grandma's photo album under the living room coffee table.
> "Seems so weird to freely share intimately private pictures of children, family scenes, etc. on the open internet."
Weird and potentially dangerous as well. When I was a child, adults warned us about "stranger danger", but now parents advertise their children to potentially dangerous strangers…
What I find truly weird is how many people there are that don't find it "weird" or at all concerning in any way to openly share such photos so freely.
We have a couple of young kiddos and we took the same approach. Family completely understands and has done a phenomenal job of respecting our request. What helped was meeting them halfway - we live away from most of our extended families, so I set up a private photo gallery on a subdomain on my personal website that family members can log into that I'll upload to once or twice a week.
Why not call your children John or Maria Smith at birth then? Wouldn't this guarantee almost full anonymity in most contexts?
The typical security precautions are very hard to maintain in real life. e.g. should your child win some spelling context or a regional crosscountry run or whatever, how would you explain to them that their name and photo are not appearing among all the other winners?
If there are random pictures of their kids in the background of some photo posted to Facebook, how are they not anonymous anymore?
I'm reminded of the scene from Jurassic park, where nedry is chastised for using a man's name during a clandestine meeting at a restaurant, and nedry yells out "Dodgson! We got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares!"
Nah, that's fine. It's more about specific photos of the kid.
>I completely support this and I intend to do something similar for my kids. Anonymity is one of the best gifts I can give them.
Same. There is something unsettling about willfully pushing kids into the attention economy, it can't be good for mental health long term and definitely assists nefarious actors build permanent profiles of them.
We did the same. My mother wasn't very understanding but she did comply. I think we caused her some issues because my sister posted on Facebook but it's all good now.
Private shared photo albums in Apple Photos are great for this. I have a small child and my wife and I live far from our extended families. Sharing photos and videos of our daughter via a shared album gives the same immediacy as posting to social media does (you even have likes, comments, etc) but it's way more private.
As long as everyone has an Apple device it just works, and I assume there is probably a similar way to do this with a Google photo album (although I will say, I think Google is way more likely to do something sketchy like default everything to public or make it easy for someone to publish content accidentally).
That might be me you're talking about, I did exactly that when my kids were born.
One of the most horrifying social media pages I've seen was an influencer who billed herself as a "trans activist" and documented every moment of her trans daughter's life.
This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online (and of course get massive likes/shares by well-intentioned folks wanting to "raise awareness"), and request donations for her "activism."
That girl will never be able to "pass" as female due to her face/identity being plastered on social media as a trans kid. She also will have to live with the horror of millions of strangers knowing the gory details of her trying to shove a knife into her wrist, chugging Tylenol, and having complete mental breakdowns at school that required emergency medical intervention.
My gut instinct also suspects the girl's poor mental health has a strong element of Munchausen by Proxy. It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge.
Despite all this, the mom was clearly raking in donations, and collecting thousands of comments about what a "hero" she was for "bringing light" to trans issues. The horrified comments by trans individuals were always buried at the bottom of posts.
The entire page felt like thinly-veiled child abuse, but there isn't anything in Facebook's code of conduct that could be used to stop it. And Facebook of course had no incentive to address the content--the page had millions of likes and was surely a great source of traffic/profit.
I would love to see policies in place to restrict this sort of child exploitation. I am all for freedom of speech on social medical platforms, but blatant exploitation of children in exchange for money is a special sort of cruelty that should be reined in.
> It is bizarre for an 8-year-old to know that Tylenol and wrist-slitting are both preferred methods for suicide, and to act on this knowledge
As a parent this really stands out. I have a kid around that age and almost his entire "serious" knowledge comes from home. He does pick a lot from other kids at school but in a very abstract way.
When I think about what is on his mind compared to what you painted there, the difference is mind-blowing. A good illustration of the dangers of social media for people —of all age— who lack guidance and perspective.
> This poor kid was 8-years-old and attempted suicide on a regular basis. Every time she tried to kill herself, the mom would document the gritty details, post pictures and details about it online
What in the absolute fuck.
That's monstrous
Munchausen's by proxy is real, and the consequences of it are at least as damaging as denying children access to medical transition services.
I believe that you have taken the position that this child is really experiencing gender dysphoria, but it's at least an equally plausible scenario that the parents are responsible for that too.
This is a serious hole in the argument for providing gender affirming care to children in an attempt to reduce harm. The trans-activist community is becoming complicit in child abuse when it denies the existence of this problem.
Ignoring the fact that 8-year-olds do not receive medical treatment for gender dysphoria, is the existence of Munchausen's by proxy also "a serious hole in the argument" for providing children with medical care in general?
Not providing a 10 year old with puberty blockers when you suspect that it is because the child has been manipulated into believing that they have gender dysphoria is practicing medicine. So I am not proposing that we deny anyone access to medicine.
Parents with Munchausen's manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning. If we allow ourselves to believe that this scenario exists, then we must allow ourselves to consider the possibility that it happens a lot, since Munchausen's is at least as common as gender dysphoria.
> Not providing a 10 year old with puberty blockers when you suspect that it is because the child has been manipulated into believing that they have gender dysphoria is practicing medicine.
Not if there is no reasonable basis for that suspicion; in that case, it is just practicing bigotry.
> Parents with Munchausen’s manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning.
Without a causal mechanism to explain the increase in both the incidence of the disorder and that particular manifestation, its a pretty crappy explanation, when “people become more likely to report symptoms that they actually have when the social stigma of reporting those symptoms is reduced and awareness exists of treatments that mitigate the symptoms” is a much better explanation with a clear causal mechanism for the upswing in reports of gender dysphoria.
> there is no reasonable basis for that suspicion
There is absolutely a reasonable basis for that suspicion. There are simply many times more prepubescent children with claims of gender dysphoria than at any other point.
How effective a test is for diagnosis depends heavily on what my priors are about the population it is applied to. If I were to administer an HIV test to every American adult, and then started everyone who got a positive result back with antiretrovirals, I would almost mostly be giving that treatment to people without HIV. This is true even though the test is very accurate. If the number of people walking into gender clinics goes up by a factor of 5, I cannot, a priori, expect that my test has the same predictive power that it used to.
> is a much better explanation with a clear causal mechanism
A priori, they are both good explanations. An explanation is good if it's simple, predictive, and you do not have the data to disprove it. The way we distinguish between competing good explanations is through testing. So far no one has proposed a test to tell the two hypotheses apart, except perhaps to look at the rate of detransitioning among the cohort of recent transitioners. This data has yet to become available, as it requires longitudinal study, but the leading signs are not necessarily in favor of your hypothesis. https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/107/10/e4261/6604653
> > Parents with Munchausen’s manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning.
> Without a causal mechanism to explain the increase in both the incidence of the disorder and that particular manifestation, its a pretty crappy explanation
Eh, what? It's right there in what you replied to: The manipulation is the causal mechanism.
> in that case, it is just practicing bigotry
You people are like broken records, honestly. Any criticism automatically becomes bigotry or hate or genocide or whatever. It's absurd.
You really need to learn to understand how conditional statements work.
> Parents with Munchausen's manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning. If we allow ourselves to believe that this scenario exists, then we must allow ourselves to consider the possibility that it happens a lot, since Munchausen's is at least as common as gender dysphoria.
You seem to have confused what used to be called Munchausen's syndrome and Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Or where you got your information did. Now they are called factitious disorder imposed on self and factitious disorder imposed on another. Factitious disorder imposed on self is estimated about as common as gender dysphoria. The ranges overlap. Estimates for factitious disorder imposed on another are much lower.[1] And most cases involve infants or very young children. Probably because older children can speak for themselves and are less pliable.
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9834-factitio...
I do not have them confused, I just didn't want to say munchausen's by proxy 30 times when it is clear from context. Munchausens by proxy is less rare than Munchausen's. The 1% figure is more or less accurate.
> Not providing a 10 year old with puberty blockers when you suspect that it is because the child has been manipulated into believing that they have gender dysphoria is practicing medicine. So I am not proposing that we deny anyone access to medicine.
Of course if there were some specific reason to believe that the child was being manipulated, then it would be medically appropriate not to treat them with puberty blockers. But you said "this is a serious hole in the argument for providing gender affirming care to children" as if you think this should be the overriding concern even when there's no specific evidence that the child is being manipulated. That is what I take issue with.
Suppose that we were discussing an influencer parent who was exploiting their child's blindness for social media views. Would you be telling people that it's just as likely as not that the child is just pretending to be blind to satisfy the parent with Munchhausen's? If not, you're special pleading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading.
> Parents with Munchausen's manipulating their prepubescent children into socially transitioning is a good explanation for the rise in prepubscent children socially transitioning
It's a very poor explanation, because more people of all ages are transitioning more than in the past, not just prepubescent children. It also stands against an obvious and much simpler explanation, which is that children today are more likely to encounter the idea that someone can be trans and much less likely to be told to suppress non-normative gendered behavior.
> we must allow ourselves to consider the possibility that it happens a lot, since Munchausen's is at least as common as gender dysphoria.
You say that as if it means that a given child presenting with gender dysphoria is just as likely to have Munchausen's by proxy as actual gender dysphoria. But there are tens of thousands of possible conditions someone with Munchausen's might imitate instead. We should expect that the fraction of them that imitate gender dysphoria is dwarfed by the number of people who actually have gender dysphoria.
It's telling that your argument is entirely theoretical. If there were a significant number of children manipulated into socially transitioning because of Munchausen's by proxy, there would be actual confirmed examples to refer to. If it were a large-scale social problem, there would be data on its prevalence. But there isn't, because this is a scenario fabricated to apply unjustified scrutiny to children with gender dysphoria.
> when there's no specific evidence that the child is being manipulated.
I disagree with your apparent assumption that "manipulation" by a parent must not only be a negative thing, but that it must also be a conscious effort made by the parent to affect their child's behavior one way or the other. I put the word "manipulation" in quotes because I believe that for many people the word carries a negative connotation, and I'm attempting to point out that in the context of parenting it absolutely does not have to be negative.
I think it's important to note that when children do things that upset a parent, the parent will naturally react in a way that potentially "manipulates" the child into not acting that way anymore.
For instance, if a child acts out at school and gets suspended for a few days, some parents might frown but then say, "That's okay. We know that this incident doesn't reflect who you are." But then let's imagine that the parent is more distant than usual that night, and doesn't interact with their child as much as they normally do (for instance, they might not ask about the child's day during dinner). Even though the parent may not be intentionally doing this (maybe they're just caught up thinking about their child, and what they can do to help), they are in fact sending signals to their child displaying their displeasure.
Similarly, when a child does something that pleases a parent, the child might discover that the parent is more talkative than usual at the dinner table that night, and more interested in what's going on in the child's life. This rewarding behavior could be explained by a parent simply being excited about their offspring succeeding.
In this way you can see that it doesn't take much to "manipulate" a child's behavior. Some people might refer to "attempting to manipulate the behavior of their children to produce a desired outcome" as "parenting". If a child throws a rock and breaks a neighbors window then a parent might scold the child, and this absolutely counts as "manipulating" the child's behavior.
Getting back to the discussion at hand, when a parent rewards their child for a specific behavior in a manner that suggests that the child is courageous and unique, the child might feel pressured to continue engaging in that behavior. If a child is considered by their parent to be courageous and unique when they engage in a specific type of behavior, what might the parent think if the child suddenly stops this behavior (from the child's perspective)? Instead of courageous and unique, will the child now suspect that their parent views them as a cowardly sheep, or a quitter? Is it so far fetched to imagine a scenario in which a child takes a certain stance as a rebellious gesture, but then finds that it backfires when their parents are thrilled about it and shares it with the world? Can you imagine the potential embarrassment of the child? Adults aren't the only humans who can get embarrassed, afterall.
In summary, even such small things as a frown or a smile (or even talking a little less or more than usual) can serve to manipulate a child's behavior, let alone ecstatically sharing every detail of a kid's behavior to the online world. Creating the equivalent of a reality TV show of a child's life will absolutely impose the unspoken expectations and unconscious biases of the parent, and will in effect manipulate the child's behavior and course of action.
Edit explanation: Clarified a point earlier in my response, and fixed/embellished a few sentences.
There's no denial of the problem, only of the attempt to elevate it into something more common than it is in an obvious ploy to make gender affirming care harder to access with a time-honored "won't someone think of the children!" moral panic that's already having negative effects on adult trans people's access to care.
There is extremely active denial of the problem. The parent comment didn't even consider this as a possibility.
Moreover, your comment is also an example. You can't simultaneously describe yourself as not denying the problem while completely dismissing that problem as "moral panic designed to deprive adults of access to care".
I am completely on board with giving adults access to care. I am significantly more hesitant to give parents access to medical interventions for their children. Please do not warp my words.
PS: You might describe Munchausen's by proxy as a rare condition, but its prevalence is on the order of 1% of the population, which happens to be at parity with the rate of gender dysphoria in the population. It is not a rounding error.
Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is called factitious disorder imposed on another now. The highest estimate I found from a reputable source was 0.04%.[1] Claims on the order of 1% turned out misreported estimates for factitious disorder imposed on self. And most cases of factitious disorder imposed on another involve infants or younger children.
The 1st comment stayed close to the article subject. It presented reason for concern even without speculating about the child's gender dysphoria. Adding that speculation predictably moved the discussion far from the original subject. Not bringing up something at every chance is not denial. Never mind extremely active denial.
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9834-factitio...
> Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is called factitious disorder imposed on another now.
Honestly, who gives a fuck?
Yeah sorry, that may sound a bit harsh... But really, what's this constant renaming of things supposed to be actually good for? The main effects seem to be:
1) Some people get to feel all good and righteous and “with it”, because they know the PC terminology; and
2) The rest of us are A) either annoyed at i) having to learn new shit again, ii) not getting to be in that hip and in crowd, or above all, iii) how smug and pompous those masters of the PC vocabulary come off, intentionally or unintentionally giving the impression that they look down on us peasants...
Or B) Just confused as to what the fuck they're talking about.
So thank you, I guess, for having taught us – me – this, so I won't look like an ignorant bumpkin next time someone says it... But I would very much have preferred not having to.
>> "Please do not warp my words."
You too?
I've been down this road. I'm not going to say anything that can convince you.
edit: You might want to consider not using the same rhetoric as folks who call people groomers for not wanting kids to kill themselves because they can't get treatment for their dysphoria. Reconsider your sources of information if you sincerely feel hurt by being seen in the same light. You are parroting propaganda.
In response to your edit, which I believe deserves its own response:
I'm basically going to ignore the part where you accuse me of using the "same rhetoric as X". I don't know what that means, or how it's relevant to what we're talking about. I'm certainly not hurt by it, as it doesn't mean anything.
If Adolf Hitler himself arose from the grave to agree with me, and that caused me to change my mind, then I would consider that evidence that I didn't have a good reason to believe it in the first place. This is not the case here.
I am actually pretty skeptical of the claim that the "people calling trans-activists groomers" are making this point. That just sounds like a name that you've given to the entire set of people who disagree with you, regardless of their reason.
Concretely, it seems that we are both of the opinion, based on the content of this comment chain, that it is important for the system to protect children. Either from killing themselves as a result of not being able to receive gender affirming care, or from their parents, who use them as a means of acquiring attention.
My claim is that it is well established that the latter problem exists, and that it exists commonly enough that it is not clear that, even under the most generous assumptions of the causal link between gender affirming care and suicide attempt reduction, that this offsets the damage that is caused by giving Abusive parents this tool.
Moreover, this is clearly not black and white. This is a matter of policy. I am not claiming that it is impossible to protect children from both threats. I am merely claiming that gender affirming care doesn't.
You might want to consider that having trouble convincing other people is explained at least as well by having a bad argument as the other people being bigots.
Because you have already decided that anyone who disagrees with you is just participating in a "moral panic".
Not anyone, no.
Yeah this is one of those stories that if you really feel like it's worth telling so that people can understand the experience of trans kids and what it's like as a parent you need to contact a journalist who knows how to do this right so they can tell the story in a way that can't be traced back to you or your child. The very last thing someone who's trans needs is to have a spotlight shoved in their face involuntarily.
I actually do work in the space of telling the stories of trans folks (although not involving kids because obviously) and even with adults we still take crazy precautions. I push hard even when we get someone who doesn't want to be anonymous because you can't put that cat back in the bag and being a google search from being outed will haunt you if you ever want to "go stealth."
> The very last thing someone who's trans needs is to have a spotlight shoved in their face involuntarily.
Exactly! This seems so incredibly obvious, and I was stunned by the thousands of followers on the page who seemed to nonchalantly view this kid's privacy and wellbeing as a worthy sacrifice for supposed "trans activism." Especially since there were quite a few negative comments from trans individuals pointing out why this was wrong and a major violation of the girl's rights.
Stories about trans kids are very important to tell, and they can be wonderful tools to encourage empathy and understanding. But they deserve the utmost caution and respect when handling them, especially when there is the complication of people being able to profit off the children.
The other startling thing about the page was the mom's complete lack of interest in shielding details such as what school or hospital the girl went to. It seemed wildly dangerous to publicly proclaim your child to be a member of an endangered minority who often faces hate crimes, and then tell the world exactly which elementary school they attend. Talk about a great way to bait nut-jobs.
I realize I sound very twisted talking about those sorts of possibilities, but as someone who works in cybersecurity, I have just seen too many creeps commit too many crimes.
I would absolutely love to see a policy that forbids the sharing of photos of children, and any identifying details of children, to a public audience. If people want to share those things with their direct network, then sure. But it seems a wild violation of personal rights to be able to share those personal details about another human being to the entire internet, when the child is far too young to consent.
> I would absolutely love to see a policy that forbids the sharing of photos of children, and any identifying details of children, to a public audience. If people want to share those things with their direct network, then sure.
And even that is difficult. I mean, let's say Facebook could be required to forbid people from sharing intimate stuff about children with the world at large, but only let them be visible to family and friends. “Wow, easy, problem solved!”, right? But then there are lots of people who have many hundreds, even thousands, of “friends”. How “direct” a network is that?!? So no, not easy at all.
Absolutely gut wrenching. This is child abuse plain and simple. These people are confusing their children and raking in the $$$ and making themselves feel good for virtue signalling. What's society heading for? Wake up.
I’m not sure social media deserves all the blame here. This kind of exploitation has its roots in reality shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and I Am Jazz - there’s no bright line between those shows and what you describe.
Those shows are just as awful.
Jazz in particular has been treated terribly. He's been physically and mentally destroyed by his family and his clinicians, brainwashed from age 2 or 3 into believing he was supposed to be a girl. This nightmare is all he's ever known. There will be no happy ending either, just misery and the shock of realizing his life is a travesty.
His show should be watched as a dire warning against the medical abuse of children.
FFS nobody's called CPS?
I saw a post from the mom mentioning CPS had been called on her, which was the only reason I didn't call myself. I am skeptical of CPS in general, but an 8-year-old with multiple, sophisticated suicide attempts, and a mother making money off these attempts, just seemed way too sketchy to ignore.
Unfortunately, it seemed CPS had cleared her. At the time (this was back in ~2017), I shared the page with a friend who works alongside CPS, and she grudgingly agreed there wasn't really anything CPS could do. The kid seemed to have legitimate medical diagnoses, and the mom could easily argue in court that she was just "documenting her daughter's medical journey."
I can't seem to find the page now, which I'm hoping means it got shut down. Fingers crossed that little girl has found health, happiness, and the privacy she deserves.
Sort of figures. Kids in America don't really have any rights.
Does anyone?
Oh yeah, I forgot: Rich people do.
Imagine how the media would cover the story of CPS going to a prominent trans activist parent of a suicidal trans child and you have your answer.
Is this I am Jazz?
somehow this reminds me of kids' quiz in Magnolia'1999 movie..
This article unfortunately doesn't cover a much darker part of the TikTok children: exploitation of the children for the titillation of online creepers. The Some Place Under Neith podcast goes into this extensively [their "Parasocial Pits Of Hell" series]. It's completely legal to vlog your children in swimming outfits or a similar level of skin exposure, have the children sing or perform for their "fans", and encourage their children to form participate in parasocial relationships with the audience. It nets mad money.
I have weirdly mixed feelings on your comment.
- I agree that parents who publicize their children on social media are massive creep in my opinion, who do a massive invasion of the child privacy. That should almost be illegal in my opinion since the child can't consent.
- At the same time saying that no skin should ever be shown ever because "it titills sexual creeps" is a dark road that points in a direction which in some places ends up at covering the faces of women for the exact same reason. Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
On the other hand in many places of Northern europe nudity is more common even in public. That works because they don't culturally associate as much nudity with sex as americans or other parts of the world do.. (You'd obviously get beaten up for masturbating in these places especially with children around.). And that doesn't seem like so bad a thing to me
You’re underselling the social and financial dynamic of specifically recording children in minimal clothing and asking them to perform for anonymous strangers on the internet.
It’s entirely different than standard social standards about clothing and nudity in public.
Precisely.
A prominent example; it's quite the read: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-12-18/...
> But it is the suit filed by 11 former members of the Squad that has placed the Piper Rockelle saga at the center of an explosive online controversy. The plaintiffs, all of whom are minors, allege in the lawsuit that Smith offered to show an 11-year-old girl how to perform oral sex, mailed Piper’s underwear to men and pretended to be a raunchy version of the family’s dead cat while inappropriately touching and harassing the children.
> Trimmer, a photographer, said Smith often urged the kids to pose more provocatively for thumbnail photo shoots — the images used to promote YouTube videos. She would frequently tell the Squad members to make ‘sexy kissing faces’ for thumbnails, to ‘push their butts out,’ to ‘suck their stomachs in,’ ‘wear something sluttier’ and would otherwise position Plaintiffs’ bodies in explicitly and sexually suggestive positions,” the complaint said.
> Numerous Squad members also allege that Smith regularly interacted online with a man posing as a young girl named “Megan” who sent her money, a Gucci bag, laptops, lawn furniture and other expensive gifts in exchange for images of Piper. In the lawsuit, Corinne said she witnessed Smith mail “several of Piper’s soiled training bras and panties to an unknown individual,” adding that Smith told her “old men like to smell this stuff.”
They know who the audience is.
We don't disagree, I was just not EVEN speaking about that.
This is miles away more horrific.
TBH I agree with you that we shouldn't forbid children from wearing standard amounts of clothing (i.e. not much) to go swimming due to creeps existing generally in the world.
I'm talking about intentionally filming one's own children for the viewership of creeps online for perpetual consumption in order to make a profit. This would be akin to making one's living by nonconsensually filming nude beach visitors in northern europe for 8 hrs+/day and uploading that online vs someone just visiting a nude beach.
Going to the pool and posting online are 2 different things.
I would be happy with a law forbidding to post public pictures of your underage kids, regardless of skin exposure.
Personally, I agree with your view-point.
However, the law you are proposing would prohibit a parent from posting an image of their child winning the spelling bee, in a full suit.
I have no idea how to thread this needle, outside making my personal choices.
I'm not sure where to draw the line in order to protect children, but a blanket ban on posting pictures of them would never survive a First Amendment challenge. US Supreme Court precedents have made it clear that any restrictions must be more narrowly targeted.
This reminds me of
https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Milford_School
> Children should be neither seen nor heard.
Surely, kids can be seen in movies, tv shows, news articles about kids competitions or events, etc?
> That should almost be illegal in my opinion since the child can't consent.
Genuine Q: at what point can the child consent? A lot of people here are talking about a media blackout of their children since the child can't consent, but when does that end? Can a 5-year-old consent to have their pictures posted online? 10? 15?
I've known 5 year olds who understood the world well enough to make such decisions about their own lives (and surprisingly enough make wise decisions about such things, and able to explain why they feel their choice is valid) but in my experience, that's always been due to good parenting giving the child early access to important "brain functionality" (logic, reason, slowing down and taking time to think before taking action and not just "freaking out" and jumping into a situation wildly, etc.) and those simply aren't skills a lotta parents teach these days (for wildly varying reasons I'm sure). Children like that are a ridiculously rare breed anymore. It'd be nice if the decision about such things depended upon the child being capable of such decisions, but how would one even determine let alone verify that a child's decision making skills were appropriate for that type of choice? Only truly caring parents, other adults who spend a lot of time around the family, and the child themselves could be really truly "in the know" about it…
My discomfort arises from centering this on the idea of a child's consent. While I admit your point makes sense, it also feels like a slippery slope - "No Chris Hansen, she was one of those rare breeds of 15-year-olds who is capable of giving consent..."
As a society we have settled on the idea that regardless of the emotional development of a minor, they are materially incapable of granting consent since we believe they do not yet the maturity to comprehend it. I know this is a terrible analogy, but alas, this is where I feel the slippery slope leads by centering this debate on the idea of consent. Yes, there is a material difference in the kinds of consent we're dealing with, but I'm not sure if they're all that different.
The real question is not "when can the child consent" (depends on the child, hard to even define) but "where put the legal age for best reasonable protection of the children". I'd be fine with "no minor on social media" < 16.
> I'd be fine with "no minor on social media" < 16.
I think is pretty broad, but do you suggest no depictions of under 16s on any online media? It's one thing to restrict minors from participating on social media, but are you suggesting their likeness cannot appear online posted by other people? Parents? School yearbook? School social club?
> Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
I don’t suggest that, but I think it’s pretty bad to post lots of swimsuit pics to social media. And it’s absolutely horrible to accept money in exchange for 1:1 videos or commissioned photos for internet strangers. There’s no legitimate purposes for adults to ask little kids to pose on swimsuits for them. I’m not sure if it should be illegal, but certainly scorned and people who practice to have appropriate levels of opprobrium.
> Should we forbid children to go to the pool because sexual creeps might go there ?
It's significant easier to hone your creepiness when you have an endless supply of training-material. It might even help you to discover this side of you in the first place.
> On the other hand in many places of Northern europe nudity is more common even in public.
Not with children. Even in Europe parents are generally quite protective with them. And here the topic of family-influencer and sexualization of their children is also a hot topic.
I have seen naked toddlers in European swimming pools/lakes.
Toddlers are infants, not children. There is different awareness according to their abilities and demands.
In the US, toddlers are toddlers, infants are infants. Both toddlers and infants are children.
https://www.verywellfamily.com/difference-between-baby-newbo...
In the late 90s I was startled by a billboard in Germany which featured a dozenish naked boys, standing shoulder to shoulder and bearing all for the camera. It was an ad for a telecom, if I recall. Some of them had pubic hair, some were too young for that. Reading up on the legality of public nudity in Germany, I wonder if this would still fly today.
Should we make Nirvana's Nevermind cover illegal?
The subject of the Nevermind album cover actually filed a civil suit over child sexual exploitation. His case was dismissed because he had waited too long to file it, so the core legal issue hasn't really been adjudicated.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/05/entertainment/spencer-elden-n...
Today it would be impossible. But also much other things in media. Like the first James Bond Casino Royale (1967). There is a scene in a tube with Bond and a younger than 18 years old girl in a tube. Or a in the movie Kickboxer (1988) with Van Damme. There is a scene when they are on a boat on a river in Thailand. You can see at least one young boy complete nude from frontside. Another scene later in the hospital. The brother just grop the butt from the nurse and everybody is laughing. To watch it today feels very strange.
Was there ever a pressing need for that cover to exist in the first place? I don't think our society would be culturally impoverished if they had simply taken a picture of something else.
Yeah, society would absolutely be culturally impoverished if this would be considered off-limit.
Limiting the space of 'allowed' expression and saying it's okay because culture is not essential isn't really the best path to take as a society.
If you Photoshop the penis out, there would be nothing remarkable about the cover. It was child exploitation as a marketing gimmick.
I think the Scorpions did something similar with putting an underage girl on the Virgin Killer album, but that may have been non-photographic (not looking it up).
Decades later, Nirvana is still a topic of discussion because of it (and still earning royalties), while the kid in question whose image is used in perpetuity gets told to pound sand because he missed an arbitrary deadline.
We don't need to exploit children as a form of creative expression. We just don't. Depravity is not cultural enrichment.
If you let the penis visible, there is still not that much remarkable. The picture was mainly about a baby swimming toward a bill used as a bait.
There is at least one picture of me (not on social media, admittedly), as a toddler, buck naked in a pool with another toddler. It was (and still is) and innocent picture even with the visible genitalia. So no, it's not automatically "depravity" to show nude people, even kids.
Don't be mistaken, I'm not for child exploration, stuff like kids beauty pageant, or over-exposed young people are downright creepy, but I'm reacting at the idea of making any representation of kids taboo.
> If you Photoshop the penis out, there would be nothing remarkable about the cover.
Says you.
> Decades later, Nirvana is still a topic of discussion because of it (and still earning royalties), ...
I think the album's popularity and the royalties aren't solely attributable to the cover :)
> We don't need to exploit children as a form of creative expression...
There is no pornography, no sexual abuse, in fact there's nothing sexual about it at all, and the parents were paid for the photo. Please help me understand how it constitutes exploitation.
How? In what way would not having a child's penis on an album cover have impoverished society?
There's no "pressing need" for any art at all, or many other wonderful things that make our lives better. It's a very shitty criteria to determine whether something should be banned or not.
That's much broader than the argument that I think is being made - or should be made. Which is that the need for an album cover art doesn't justify making public images of a nude child who clearly cannot consent to such.
I find it hard to believe anybody could describe that cover as a "wonderful thing" that "made their life better."
If it's really art for the sake of art, art justifying itself, then let it be done for free. I want the monetization of such things banned, because I don't think this is art for the sake of art. I think child modelling is done for the sake of commercial exploitation.
I sympathize with your position, but if it leads to us saying "I don't think this art does enough good for society, so it should not exist" then I'm out, and if it leads to us saying "you can say what you want, but you can't make a living off it unless it gets approval by a moral authority" then I'm also out.
The "slippery slope" here is that I apply my above argument to all monetization of children. But that is where the slope stops. The slope is in fact simply the existing social standard against child labor, with the entertainment industry carve-outs removed.
> I find it hard to believe anybody could describe that cover as a "wonderful thing" that "made their life better."
I didn't say that this art cover is such a thing. I attacked your criteria of a "pressing need" with this description, this argument is independent of discussion about this particular cover.
> I want the monetization of such things banned, because I don't think this is art for the sake of art.
I don't think anyone should be able to ban other people from committing voluntary transactions. The band wants to sell the album. I want to buy it. Somebody else's opinions on what is and what isn't art are not relevant to either of us.
While I find parents doing this extremely concerning I am personally really hesitant to change anything because I can't think of any way to change it that doesn't seriously hinder normal and not creepy parental uses of images/videos of their children. We are already running into overreach problems trying to curtail the stuff we clearly need to curtail (i.e. that guy having to deal with the police for sending his kid's pediatrician a picture of some problem) I can't imagine what that would end up like if it happened on a large portion of videos shared with your kids in it.
I like the (for some reason downvoted) reasonable suggestion by someone else to simply not monetize videos containing children. Doesn't YouTube already have some kind of classifier that finds children in videos, which lets them turn off commenting on those videos? Just extend that to also de-monetize them.
Sure, it doesn't solve the problem of child videos using other monetization channels like product placement, sponsorships and so on but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Will this apply to Hollywood movies which star minors? Or AMA winning musicians who are minors?
If we exempt them from your new rules, why?
We need to be very careful about Well Intentioned rules (or worse, laws) because they will be applied selectively and in ways the authors didn't intend.
I don't know--those are edge cases, let the legislators figure them out later. Too often we give up with "it can't be done" because we can't find a perfect solution for every little edge case. Instead of at least taking an imperfect but vital first step, we do nothing.
> While I find parents doing this extremely concerning I am personally really hesitant to change anything because I can't think of any way to change it that doesn't seriously hinder normal and not creepy parental uses of images/videos of their children
Ban the commercialization of videos and images containing kids. No more child actors, singers, models, etc. Remove the child labor law exceptions which have been given to these industries.
> No more child actors
it'd make movies better, anyway
That guy had to deal with the cops, because Google spied on him and didn't even bother talking to him first to find out why he took those pictures, but immediately assumed the worst. Thankfully the cops investigated the case and concluded that it wasn't a crime.
I think it's a relatively easy line to draw.
If you're posting content to the public (i.e. random strangers), you're on one side of the line. If you're posting content in a controlled manner to people consisting of friends and family you actually know, you're on the other side of the line.
This would made half summer family albums on Facebook illegal. People share fotos of swimming kids on public spaces all the time. And no, those fotos are not sexy nor meant to be.
Do people really post their family albums publicly?
Posting privately for your extended family yes, but that should never be posted publicly.
Yes they do. Internet if full of it. Usual intention is to show it to friends and family. In 99.99% of case, no one outside of family cares at all. The photos of kids posted on public albums nobody cares about are massively outnumbering youtube starts earning money on making their kids into internet stars.
The issue is trying to ban an innocent thing - photo of a kid in state normally seen in public vs "making kids perform for camera, encourage them children to form participate in parasocial relationships with the audience".
No kid ever build parasocial relationship by having photo in family album, even if public. And photos of kids are as old as photography.
One could make regulations about monetization of such things I guess. Monetization does not just happens randomly. You have to enter into contract with social network to send you money, you fill taxes. That could be workable, theoretically.
If you post something on Facebook for "friends", and you have 5,000 friends, then is that really any different from posting publicly? And who counts as "extended family"? Like are third cousins in or out? And if you tag anyone in your post then it's also visible to all of their friends as well.
It's important to protect the private lives of our children. But it's very challenging to draw clear, enforceable lines in criminal laws and social media terms of service.
For starters, zero monetization of any social media content involving children.
Second step, zero public posts involving children, maybe with some narrow carveouts.
Yes, let's narrow even more the kind of content allowed in platforms with draconian laws.
"I'm sorry mister, but we can see chidren playing in the park at 44:28 in the hour-long documentary you've produced, so we had to remove the video."
/s
I think it is entirely reasonable to totally ban any media that has any person who haven't given explicit release on their likeness. It isn't too much to ask for valuing everyone's privacy.
That wouldn't have knock on effects like utterly destroying investigative journalism or anything.... There are tons of things that people would censor if the above were law that are not in the public interest to be censored.
In the US, there is no general expectation of privacy in a public place.
Implementing your proposal is also unreasonable: before one took a photo of their spouse in the park, they would have to clear the background of all persons or get their explicit consent.
Maybe allow private use, but to publish anywhere for example in social media or other media absolutely.
Would this also apply to journalists? Only uncredentialed journalists without a government license?
If there was a protest outside my business, could I post a photo of the crowd online? What if it were a riot?
What if, as I and a large crowd were peacefully leaving an event, I lifted my camera above my head and blindly took a photo of the mass of people shoulder to shoulder?
Many places have laws which would prevent someone from taking a photo of an individual and selling copies of that photo without the subjects permission; but these laws don't usually apply to someone in the background or a crowd shot, and they don't apply to non-commercial use or some commercial uses, including journalism.
In theory is already illegal, because it is child work. So I guess it is illegal in most countrys anyway.
Is the aim to pathologise children as such or to pathologise any interest in and interaction with them?
Same can be said about child beauty contest.
And the movie and music industries. Humorous video about this serious topic, which outlines the problem of parents selling their kids to these industries in a palatable manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJh6jgnqn_s
There should be a general blanket ban on parents monetizing their kids. We don't need child actors in movies, most stories can be written to avoid their necessity. And maybe very soon, it should be feasible to replace child actors with CGI.
Child pageants are creepy AF. They are perfect targets for creeps - former President Trump, for example, got alleged by five women to have walked in on girls as young as 15 while they were changing [1] -, but even without that level of creepiness, the sexualization of young girls has been closely linked to mental health issues down the road [2].
And this legalized pedophilia industry makes 5 billion dollars a year[3]. Unbelievable.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/teen-bea...
[2] https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report
[3] https://truthout.org/articles/child-beauty-pageants-a-scene-...
My wife and I watched a season of this stuff just to gawk at how terrible/creepy it was. Then we felt bad about contributing towards its popularity and stopped.
Wholly agree and people do recognize it as such. Also child actors (though they don't have all things in common, one thing they often have in common is exploitation by their parents/guardians as well as industry).
Yes it can...
AFAIK, it's empirically established that access to pornography lowers rape rates.
So maybe access to videos of lightly dressed children, icky as it may feel, lowers the rate of pedophile rape.
The concern isn't that these children will be raped or that pedophiles will rape them. It's much more subtle: these are children who are taught from a young age to be exploited. They are taught not to have boundaries with strangers, to tie self-worth and sense of self to external validation, and to squash down their own feelings of discomfort or even danger in order to placate authority figures around them. These are all things that they will have to spend a lot of resources and time unlearning to grow into healthy adulthood, hampered by the fact that videos of their exploitation will be continually on the internet for everyone to see for the rest of their lives.
I think this assumes that pedophiles are born with an attraction to children, as opposed to somehow having formed a mental association between children and sex through environmental factors. I wonder if there is evidence in either direction? From an evolutionary perspective the latter would be my default assumption, as the postulated evolutionary rationales for, say, homosexuality, at least, would not really apply to pedophilia.
Apparently, this is known as Sharenting and has its own Wikipedia page... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharenting
> Sharenting is the practice of parents publicizing sensitive content about their children on internet platforms. While the term was coined as recently as 2010, sharenting has become an international phenomenon with widespread presence in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom. As such, sharenting has also ignited disagreement as a controversial application of social media. Detractors find that it violates child privacy and hurts a parent-child relationship. Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context.
There is a section "Applicable legislation":
> There appears to be little guiding legislation regarding parents' online control over their children's media. While different countries have their respective laws to protect children's privacy, most hand over the responsibility to the children's guardians, which sharenting may exploit as the parent is able to take advantage of their child's power to consent. This presumption in favor of the parent fails to protect the child's privacy from their parents.
> Under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations broadly advocates for a child's individual identity. Article 14 outlines the applicable legal guardians' duty to represent the child's best interest.
Which then goes into the specifics for Europe and the United States.
> Proponents frame the practice as a natural expression of parental pride in their children and argue that critics take sharenting posts out of context.
You know this framing is BS because they'd all scream bloody murder if monetizing that content were outlawed. It's not about pride in their children, it's about monetizing their children. Of course it's no surprise that somebody psychopathic enough to do this to their kids would also be comfortable lying about their motivation.
I think you're underestimating how twisted these peoples pathologies can get. They don't see any of it logically. They're exploitative monsters because they have no emotional control or situational awareness. Words of strangers online are reality to them. Thats how they got on the path theyre on in the first place. In their brief moments of clarity where they encounter intense cognitive dissonance is where the suicide attempts enter (how the kid likely learned about such methods).
Usually these types of behaviors are accelerated with some kind of pharmaceuticals.
No, really. A lot of people just want to show off kids to family and friends, and don't think about the repercussions of making it public on Facebook. The bulk of kid pics post there are not exploitation by the poster, they just don't know better than to trust zuck with photos of children.
> No, really. A lot of people just want to show off kids to family and friends, and don't think about the repercussions of making it public on Facebook
Those posts aren't monetized. To monetize social media posting requires intent, it doesn't happen by accident.
And we're talking about "sharenting" which does not imply monetization at all, hence why the post I replied to was off base.
This definition easily encompasses the people who post their kids' lives for no monetary gain,which is the vast majority of social media users. A lot of the people in their 20s who share every detail of their life on social media continue to do so once they have kids.
With how toxic we already know social media is, steeping someone's entire childhood experience in it is just awful. I'm hoping the bills for child protection discussed in the articles are passed, but even supposing they are... how many children will be destroyed before they even realize the damage that's been done? Sure, they'll be able to get money or have the videos taken down, but just as there's a trend among Hollywood child stars for their futures...
I guess the solution is to try to take some of the law's protecting child actors and apply them to influencers? https://www.wrapbook.com/blog/child-actor-labor-laws
I think it is hard, because influences are in random jurisdictions and just arise without much structure. Maybe it can be controlled at the platform level, like YouTube and TikTok as they are the ones funnel money to these influencers? It would require some creativity and a lot of desire.
The problem I see here is where would the "line" be? That is, when does that video you post on Instagram of your family at Disney or someone blowing out candles at a birthday stop being just a family video and starts being content?
I guess the easy way to make that distinction would be if your content is "monetized" but even then it seems like there are many loopholes and gotchas.
> The problem I see here is where would the "line" be? That is, when does that video you post on Instagram of your family at Disney or someone blowing out candles at a birthday stop being just a family video and starts being content?
A simpler definition could be how a content is meant to be spread; whether it is "broadcast" vs. "multicast/unicast".
Like, I cannot think of any legitimate reasons a kid's "performance" needs to be on tiktok. Facebook/whatsapp, maybe, if you're sharing it only with your friends, or even YouTube with linked-only if you want to send the link to grandma. But why would you ever want to publicly post a video of your child for five million+ viewers?
Would you have allowed America’s Funniest Home Videos?
Or sharing of videos on Youtube like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Bit_My_Finger
Of course, when there was no money in it, it was easier to assume children were not being harmed or otherwise manipulated for the purpose of making the video.
AFHC and the stations that aired it were at least accountable to the FCC (and advertisers) if things got weird. Advertisers knew what the show entailed.
There is no such licensing or enforcement mechanism for amateur online content creators (except 2257), and the "stations" are absolved of any complicity (230). Advertisers have little idea what content they're sponsoring since content delivery is a shell game. Creators can pivot from toy unboxing videos to dildo recommendations mid-stream without any oversight.
It took upstream payment processors going rogue to force compliance with 2257, because apparently we don't have a functional government to enforce its own laws anymore. The situation is not at all the same.
Yes, so I would think the first solution is proper enforcement of existing laws.
Because there's an audience for it?
There's an audience for kitten crush videos too. Demand for a thing doesn't excuse producing the thing.
>That is, when does that video you post on Instagram of your family at Disney or someone blowing out candles at a birthday stop being just a family video and starts being content?
When you do it on an account that makes money or is even tangentially involved with making money.
When it earns money? When you just post video on Instagram, there is no way you will get money magically. You need to enter into contract somehow. That goes for any social network. Literally none of them will send you money unless you actively initiates it.
I think you can have some triggers, like X views or Y followers and at least Z videos or something like that and also that they have monetization turned on. Make it high enough that it excludes 99.9% or more of people posting family videos.
One problem with this approach is that a lot of times monetization in tiktok or instagram happens through third party sponsors/product placements, rather than directly between the platform and the content creator.
Not sure amount of views or likes really matter. If you are interested in profiting from your kid, you will actively promote their content. It's rare to reach a lot of popularity without active promotion. I would draw the line there. Actively promote your kid Social network content should be just banned.
I always found it strange that child labor laws have an exception for acting. From what I've seen, acting is probably a worse job for kids than many of the jobs that are outlawed.
It's because an adult can do almost all jobs where child labor would be used, usually it's just that adults are more expensive; but in acting we don't really want to say that movies are prohibited to show kids or that all kid roles must be played by adult actors.
Like, do we want to make a rule that a family drama must be filmed without showing that family's kids? If not, then we have to permit child acting at least in some way.
You might well be right, but it's odd when you really think about it. We're allowing behavior we deem immoral or harmful to happen in cases where we think it makes our entertainment a bit better.
Child labor laws are presented as intending to protect the child, but the reality is it's created to protect adult workers from cheap competition.
That's what PP described (even if they didn't realize it):
"It's because an adult can do almost all jobs where child labor would be used, usually it's just that adults are more expensive;"
It's not about morality or protecting children from harm; that's just the lie that's used to sell it.
You are making a moral judgement and applying it to everyone -- but I think you are in the minority in thinking that. Most people don't see children actors and think of them as being harmed and the production immoral.
I believe the parent comment's point would be better formulated as: We make an exception for child actors but do so thoughtlessly; if we applied the same lines of moral reasoning that leads us to prevent children from working elsewhere, many of those lines would prevent us from making an allowance for paid child actors. But we fail to make the application of those lines of reasoning in this case because of cultural loopholes and blinders, not any limitation in the reasons themselves.
The one line of reasoning I can think of that does limit itself in this regard is the one says "there are no good adult substitutes for child actors, hence an exception," but this is a very cynical moral ground for child labor laws, as there are probably many potential exceptions that could be forced here that we would find profoundly repugnant and we would have to abandon that line of reasoning or be forced to admit we are more interested in industry outcomes than the welfare of children or our moral worth.
Well, the difference is also that many children want to act -- I don't think any children want to work in a meat processing plant. Are we do deny them artistic expression because we think it is morally strange? We allow many exceptions to things for strange reasons because we are humans and are kind of strange. We allow kids to homeschool and we allow them hobbies -- if their hobby is acting should they not be allowed to be paid for it as long as they homeschool?
There is no 'moral' answer. We, as a society decided that children acting is fine and that it is not outrageous and we like watching entertainment with children instead of exclusively adults. People are concerned for good reason because hollywood is predatory and when lots of money is involved then people act out of bad interests instead of the child's interests, but that is tertiary to the fact that acting is allowed for children to do and we allow them to get paid for it.
What children do or do not want is an unreliable signal of what is good for their long-term well being.
Being paid changes the dynamic in a deep way from being a hobby. It opens up the floodgates of manipulation and abuse.
How is it at all tertiary? It's the primary point: we don't allow children to work for pay because of the potential for abuse; children get paid to act; many child actors are abused as a result of extracting money from them and their labor.
We make an exception because it is convenient, not well understood by the public, and we all benefit from the resultant entertainment.
> What children do or do not want is an unreliable signal of what is good for their long-term well being.
Sure, you can make them do things or forbid them from doing things you deem inappropriate or detrimental -- if they are your own kids. When society tells other parents what to do or not to do, then we are in different territory.
> How is it at all tertiary?
Forbidding all work is one end of the spectrum which is obviously stupid (no lawn work, no babysitting, etc) while forbidding no work is obviously stupid (let 12 year olds operate construction cranes). It is finding the in between that is difficult.
Acting for money is fine when it is what, $50 for a community gig? Or $5000? What if they are exceptionally talented? Or you say, nope, zero dollars for anything a minor produces since they cannot produce things of value?
Where do you draw the line?
Hence, the 'lots of money' part is tertiary to the 'we let them do it' part.
I wonder if we'll reach a point where AI can convincingly stand in for child actors.
You could argue that acting is a child doing something they want to do as artistic expression. Like, could you ban a kid from playing a concert if they are good at violin or piano; or could you ban them from selling their artwork or their singing?
People are fine with kids selling someone some arts and crafts they made, but most people don’t think children should be making things in factories. Likewise, a school play is completely different from the life that most children actors live.
Wil Wheaton talks about this a lot. A good entry point if you don't want to read through his blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eoDeIw7G1I
Seeing how he's overcome all that, beat alcohol, and was able to find a place in the world of media that was about his interests rather than his mother's is inspiring, but a lot of kids don't make it out so well-adjusted. And even here it took decades.
I think it's really difficult because one person's heartwarming family content is another person's child exploitation. IMO there should be a rule that no children appear in public social media content (private would be fine) but I'm sure a great many people would be offended by that. It's tough when shitty parents have the legal right to be shitty.
Maybe a law where if your views of your videos with your kids have more than X followers or Y views on more Z videos -- it is definitely not just for friends and family and it isn't just a random video going viral. I could see that working.
I think that the solution is to have all such people register with no exceptions. Just make X and Y and Z high enough that it excludes the large majority of people.
"Heartwarming family content" is a wonderfully shuddersome phrase.
I'm not some Rand-worshiping libertarian, but I do think the immediate response of (more or less) "there oughta be a law" whenever something negative gets press is maybe not ideal.
These people should probably be shamed publicly for this kind of exploitation, for sure. And things like the Coogan law should be applied when the kids are a big part of the brand.
> Claire says her father has told her he may be her father, but he’s also her boss.
This sounds super-scummy. I'm not surprised she's pissed-off. Both parents quit working? And if Claire doesn't perform, they'll lose their home and she won't be able to "have nice things"? Talk about emotional blackmail.
The examples in the article aren't even the worse ones I've seen. There's a class of videos where the parents have a special interest, or specific lifestyle they want to live and not only they force their kids to live that life and do those things, but also record them for views. There's one with a family that lives in an RV (willingly) with very little space and they make the children record videos for views. I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...
>I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...
If you're thinking of daddyofive, IIRC they had the two kids who were from the dad's previous marriage taken away and put in their bio mom's custody. They were then charged with child neglect and restricted from uploading footage of their kids. They ignored that restriction with no consequences though.
> I also remember a Youtube channel that made videos where one of the kids was constantly "pranked" because they thought it was funny...
That was the Daddyofive/Familyofive situation. IIRC they eventually ended up loosing custody of all their kids.
I remember another where the parents were hardcore endurance athletes and they had their kids running marathons at the age of 7 or something like that. They bragged about having to "bribe" their exhausted kids into continuing to run.
Once again money is the root of all evil. What would be the downside if all videos that had any children in them were demonetized? In addition, buttons for sharing such videos would be automatically disabled. That means a parent could post the video and send links to family, but it would make it less likely for the video to go viral.
Looking at the example of culture even before the internet, kids who participate in entertainment from a young age end up often messed up. For example see the Jacksons (Michael being only the most prominent example in his family) as well as a multitude of child stars (Shirley Temple being the exception that proves the rule).
I bet once you removed the financial incentive a lot of this over sharing of kids’ lives would mostly stop.
Christoper Robin Milne is a famous example of having one's childhood turned into content, although obviously nothing anywhere near as pervasively as happens with attention-starved "influencers" leveraging their children for a dopamine rush:
Similarly, Dennis Ketcham, son of "Dennis the Menace" author Hank Ketcham:
Why aren’t all the participants (influencers) in a performance (channel) automatically actors already? That seems obvious. We acknowledge people with blogs as writers and authors. Is the weird, made-up language around streaming an intentional obfuscation of the precedent in behavior and law?
"that was supposed to be our racket!" -Teen Vogue
Teen Vogue has actually been something of a respectable journalism outlet for some time. It's not the Post, but it's one of the few outlets I've found respectable journalism when I've come across their articles.
turning your child into "the product" is pretty close to "child labor"
Social media really highlights how many narcissists are among us.
Agency. It’s about agency.
Social media, while not permanent, can be long lasting, and can have a chilling effect on a child’s future agency.
Guarding it until they can make their own decisions is what all good parents ought to do.
How is this not obvious and common sense?
I feel terrible for kids like this whose entire lives are put on the Internet and there's nothing they can do about it. Like that poor autistic kid, whose mother used him to make videos and make money, and then "re-homed" him like he was an animal.
I think that's an unnecessarily harsh take on what happened.
People adopt. Some people purposely adopt kids that they know have special needs. Sometimes, people with the best intentions, end up in a situation where they are way over their heads. Before you're actually in the situation, there's no possible way to know how difficult it will be, nor what your limits are. (And until you've seen someone actually overwhelmed, it's hard to even imagine what that looks like.) If a child's needs are beyond your limits, you are doing them absolutely no favors to keep them in your home. Having any child, even one biologically your own, is fundamentally a risk.
So consider some hypotheses:
A. The couple in question genuinely wanted to help a child who needed help; and genuinely wanted to inspire other people to adopt by sharing the sorrows and joys; but unexpectedly found themselves in over their head, and made the difficult (and publicly embarrassing) decision to pass the child on to someone better suited to care for them
B. The couple in question thought that a good way to make a few bucks would be to adopt a difficult child for 6 months, get a large viewership, and then pass them on to someone else
I mean, I suppose B is possible, but it seems like a really dumb way to go about things. There would certainly be lots of easier ways to make money.
Whether it was right to make a public spectacle of the child's situation, even assuming the best intentions, is a different question.
I'm adding C: the couple in question wanted to feel important and thought about how nice would they appear in networks if they just adopted a difficult kid, so they did that without really thinking about the kid or even their own wellbeing. So, at the moment motivation ran out they bailed out because it wasn't worth it, but they didn't go in thinking to pass the child after a few months.
In other words, there's a third option other than "malice" and "good intentions": narcissism.
But the most important thing, as the other commenter says: making a public spectacle of the child's situation is the question that's being asked here. And it's an important question because the ability to make a public spectacle might be the difference between some people getting kids or not.
> Whether it was right to make a public spectacle of the child's situation, even assuming the best intentions, is a different question.
Um....disagree. That's literally THE question being discussed.
Overtonwindow was implying case B. I'm trying to say that case A is much more likely, without saying anything one way or another about how it relates to TFA.
And the people who adopted a disabled kid from China I think, made their content and found them a new home when stuff got too hard.
I'm not sure but I think you are referencing the same story? I looked and only really found media about this:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/202...
I really hope that you've been horribly misinformed. I have no words otherwise...
Oh man the situation with international adoptions is so much worse than even that.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
Seems like lawsuits against YouTube waiting to happen - this should at least be called out in the material risks section of Alphabet SEC filing.
It's not that hard to automatically detect when a kid is in some content and automatically de-monetize it.
I think a film that covers this is "Men, Woman, and Chrildren."
The purity spiral on full display in this comment section. Somehow social media makes it the default state on topics like this, even in places that typically have a lot of nuance.
I'm here for the cynical take: the size of the issue depends on whether it's successful. Lots of childhoods suck, and lots of parents make bad decisions.
"My childhood was made into content and all I got was this multi-million dollar inheritance" doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of people have worse childhoods and don't get a penny.
The implication of your take is that we should exploit children as much as possible because it might pay off big, as long as we don't cross the line into "worst childhood of all time".
Not quite (because the chance of success is very small), but if you're a successful influencer and then exploit the fact that you have children for even more growth, the trauma is probably small and the therapy is easily covered with the amounts of money you're making (which makes SWE salaries look tiny in comparison).
It's not positive, but it's "I have a splinter in my finger" relatively to what many (most?) children experience who don't grow up in the top 1%.
There's another post on the front page currently about over 100 kids who were illegally employed in hazardous jobs, and yesterday we had an article about laws being proposed to remove the hourly limits on child labor. I think the children affected by those things would prefer to have had their face on their mommy's instagram and never have to work a day in their life over working in a meat sanitation plant from their 13th birthday on.
It's all relative, but I guess that's an unpopular opinion. Maybe most here feel closer to the kids on instagram than those in the meat packing plant.
I think you're misunderstanding the realistic state of child influencers. These children have no guarantee of access to any money they "earn", and also the chance of earning that much is quite low. Just like most influencers, most of them don't make anywhere near a fulltime income an adult could make even on minimum wage, but are left with lifelong distortions of how to be a person that have to be unlearned.
I don't think it's reasonable to excuse or downplay exploitation of children in one way because exploitation of children occurs another way elsewhere. We can argue against addressing harm to children because other harm happens to children all the way down to the source of Omelas's good fortune if you like, but I don't think this results in positive societal outcomes.
>but are left with lifelong distortions of how to be a person that have to be unlearned.
"Lifelong distortion" is a strong claim that hasn't been demonstrated. I wonder how much of this consternation for kids being present online is a generational thing. People from the generation where privacy was the default are reacting badly to the movement towards no privacy being the default. Of course, those from the old generation take it for granted that their way of living is the right way and the alternative is "distortion". I'm also from that generation and I cringe at how easily people destroy their own privacy. But I don't make the mistake of assuming this emotion has normative value. The world is moving to a social-media infused existence. Being a digital luddite isn't obviously the superior lifestyle. Preventing kids from making the most of it isn't obviously in their best interests.
The discussion was not about children being present online or choosing a social media career. It was about parents making those decisions for children. Including children who did not want it.
> I think you're misunderstanding the realistic state of child influencers.
I think their point is that you and many others are underestimating how bad a "normal" childhood can be.
I don't think working in a meat-packing plant is comparable to being used by influencer parents, but that doesn't mean the latter is small potatoes. They're very different situations.
> When the family’s channel started to rake in the views, Claire says both her parents left their jobs because the revenue from the YouTube channel was enough to support the family and to land them a nicer house and new car. “That’s not fair that I have to support everyone,” she said. “I try not to be resentful but I kind of [am].”
Maybe I was raised differently, but it sounds like her family got the deal of a lifetime. Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it. I know folks here on H1B that live shoestring and send more than half of what they make back home to their family, and are happy to do so. I know it's easy to paint Claire as having been exploited here, but can one not look at the bigger picture and see that this is clearly a positive thing for their family?
If I was 17 again and had the opportunity to post videos of myself talking instead of my parents working 50h weeks, I know I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Well that's your choice in retrospect though, she wants out and is effectively being forced, which is not ok. Just a bit father down:
>Once, she told her dad she didn’t want to do YouTube videos anymore and he told her they would have to move out of their house and her parents would have to go back to work, leaving no money for “nice things.”
> Supporting your parents financially is just part of life for a lot of people, some even get a lot of happiness out of it.
Yeah, lots of people find happiness in things done with consent. Those same people find unhappiness, resentment, and anger when those same things are done without consent.
Consent matters!
Children are not born owing their parents anything.
This take is disgusting, frankly, because it ignores the core issue: that it was nonconsensual. It would be like commenting on a marital rape story "but many wives love having sex with their husband!"
The article says that this child is considering cutting off all contact with her parents when she turns 18 and can move out. Does that sound like happiness to you?
Monetize your kids at your own risk.
> Children are not born owing their parents anything.
Yes they are. That is the function of children with respect to parents in the circle of life, just as it is the function of parents to care for children. Not all obligations are ones you voluntarily undertake.
Of course there are boundaries to the scope of that obligation. But those are defined by society, not "consent." The problem in Claire's story is that the parents are perfectly capable of working but choose to burden her instead.
More importantly, assuming that children are born owing their parents anything leads to deeply unhealthy societal outcomes:
- This enables abusive parenting styles and forces adult children to need to unlearn this lie in order to come to terms with their abuse;
- This enables parents having an outsized influence on adult children, such as controlling their sexuality, interests, physical location, etc;
Frankly: the parents have an obligation to care for their children because they generally chose to have children or chose to keep them once they were had. The child did not choose to be born and does not have a choice on the quality of their parentage. It's unacceptable to then place the burden on the child for choices they didn't make and have no control over.
Nobody chooses to be born. Does that mean that there are no moral obligations that arise by virtue of one’s existence as a human? Can obligations only arise from voluntary choice?
“Choice” is not the be-all end-all of morality (or, really, even particularly important). The obligation for parents to care for their children and vice versa arises from the nature of people and the nature of the relationship. Parents have an obligation to care for children even when they didn’t choose to have children. Conversely, children have an obligation to care for parents even though they didn’t choose to be born.
> Parents have an obligation to care for children even when they didn’t choose to have children.
People who didn't choose to have children are not called parents.
> Conversely, children have an obligation to care for parents even though they didn’t choose to be born.
You've offered nothing to support this supposed (but not really) symmetry. This seems like back-rationalization of some cultural norm or tradition (especially when coupled with your anti-individualism swipes in the other comment).
Perhaps your beliefs are not as preordained as you may believe.
Thank you for sharing your opinions and belief systems with us, no matter how peculiar.
This isn't and one off believe system. It's strongly prevalent in most non western countries and was prevalent in western countries for a long time before now. We're the outlier not him.
"Parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are even some who insist on it) are like usurers," says Kafka in his 1914-1923 diaries.
Bad parenting is like water flowing, it doesn't need any particular justification in order to be enabled and find a way to manifest itself
Going into parenthood with that mentality is a surefire way of making sure the children won't care at all about that "obligation".
People take care of their families because of a bond that has nothing to do with blood. That bond is uniquely about mutual feelings and as a parent we have only a few years to make that bond last a lifetime.
If it's formed on top of obligations and resentment it'll break the first chance it gets. Just take a look at one of the kids in the article: she probably had a great life materially, but the minute she turns 18 she's willing to never talk to her parents ever again.
Only in societies, like certain parts of America, beset with pathological levels of individualism. In healthy societies, that obligation generally doesn’t lead to resentment because (1) it’s a mutual and reciprocal obligation; and (2) people understand that they have roles and obligations that arise by virtue of their very existence as a human being.
To be clear, in this particular example the parents are breaching their side of the obligation by burdening their kid while they’re still healthy and able to work.
I'd advise against judging health of personal interaction in a society based on interactions between parents and children. Calling one healthy over the other has many issues.
Just one example: in India people help one's families to a huge extent. But kids are also brought up under heavy use of corporal punishment and there's a high degree of family involvement in children's affairs, such as dictating career choices and marriage. Is that a healthier society?
If societal pressure is the only reason why people take care of their families, what's the point? So I don't find it individualistic if someone does not feel obliged to help, it's much more complex than that. There should be more between a parent and child than obligation and well-defined roles. I help my family because I love them, because they raised me to love them, not solely because they're my ancestors.
> Just one example: in India people help one's families to a huge extent. But kids are also brought up under heavy use of corporal punishment and there's a high degree of family involvement in children's affairs, such as dictating career choices and marriage. Is that a healthier society?
Yes. If an Indian village raises their kids the way Americans do everyone would die of starvation.
Sounds like a tidy solution to the human rights violation that is arranged marriage, and the closely associated tradition of honor killings, the murder of a woman by her immediate family for refusing to submit herself sexually to those chosen by her family for her.
The idea that someone could hold such cultures up as an ideal is literally insane to me.
It seems to me that these systems stem from the basic concept that women and children are the personal inanimate property of their family unit, to be disposed of however the family wishes, like a used car or a plot of land. The idea that this is healthy or normal appears to be a rationalization and not rooted in any basis besides tradition.
For a lot of Indians Arranged Marriage tends to more like introductions from friends except you replace friends with your family.
No one forced my Mother to marry my Father. There was a period where they just talked and got to know each other. She could have said no. Nor did she have to compromise on her career. It was not a business transaction where my Father went to a supermarket to get one wife to cook and bear sons.
It looks like you've read about an Arranged marriage that went bad in a news article and seem to have decided that you know all that's there to it.
> It seems to me that these systems stem from the basic concept that women and children
It's more about having a narrower sense of the scope of the individual relative to the collective and the relevance of individual choice. Both facilitated marriages and parents' involvement in career choices arise from the quite sound premises that (1) young people are bad at making decisions and can benefit from the acquired and collective wisdom of the family; and (2) that people have a moral obligation to perpetuate society and support families, and fulfilling those obligations isn't about individual choice. (Note that both principles apply equally to men and women.)
No. The reciprocal obligation that people have, having been taken care of as children, is that they take care of their own children in turn.
Parents are adults who can and should care for themselves. You aren't born into debt.
To expect both your parents, as well as your children, to be responsible to you at both ends of your life is selfish and entitled.
At 17 you are an adult and have a choice. By the time this kid could reason about this stuff she already had her privacy taken away forever.
The people supporting their parents financially should not be 7 years old tho. It is a lot of pressure for a kid.
> I know it's easy to paint Claire as having been exploited here, but can one not look at the bigger picture and see that this is clearly a positive thing for their family?
Something being good for parents and siblings does not necessary imply it is good for the kid. The distinction matters. Sometimes it is a balancing acts and other times it is simply an exploitation.